We all know how great in-person communities can be, but what happens when things don’t go so well? What happens when people in your community cause conflict and make things difficult for everyone else? Here is a practical path towards successfully mediating conflict within community.

When organising events for a community, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that bigger is better. This is an especially dangerous trap when your community is still in the early stages – shooting for a large event before your community is ready for it will inevitably do more harm than good.

Community management, particularly within an open-source project like WordPress, shares many of the same values and ideas as pastoral leadership – a path that I am deeply familiar with from my studies and experiences.

WordCamps are, by definition, local events. There are many opinions about this within the community, some of which conflict with the guidelines set down for WordCamps. With that in mind, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on it all from the perspective of a long-time WordCamp organiser who used to be critical of many of those guidelines but now works on the WordCamp Central team.

Earlier this month, I chaired a panel at WordCamp Cape Town that was all about contributing to WordPress. As I wasn’t answering the questions on the day myself, I thought I’d pick out a few of the interesting ones and answer them here.